Fast Five recently helped America rediscover her love affair with one Vin Diesel, a modern-day, gay Jimmy Stewart named after truck fuel. Part two of his comeback tour, after proving he still lives life a quarter-mile at a time, is returning to the delightful family comedy of The Pacifier, which he hopes to do in MGM’s The Machine.

While MGM’s reputation around town is that of a remake factory, mining its library, Machine is an original project coming from Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, the writers of Night at the Museum who also worked with Diesel on his action comedy The Pacifier.

According to MGM, Diesel will play “a human-like machine created in secrecy by the Pentagon as the world’s first true ultimate weapon. Twenty years after the project was buried and decommissioned for reasons unknown, The Machine is discovered by a kid who befriends him. When the government learns it has been reactivated, The Machine must protect the family harboring him. [THR]

That the guys from Reno 911 wrote Night at the Museum, The Pacifier, and the delightful Jimmy Fallon-Queen Latifah joint Taxi is probably something I should’ve known, but didn’t (Lennon-McShartney?). I guess it’s hard to begrudge them making money on scripts that probably take twenty minutes to write. “Okay, so The Pacifier was basically Kindergarten Cop. How can we do another movie that’s like that, but different?”